Tootfinder

Nepalese "Gen Z" protestors set fire to the offices of daily newspaper Annapurna Post and of Kantipur Media Group, housing its print, TV, and radio divisions (Committee to Protect Journalists)
https://cpj.org/2025/09/nepal-protests

Nepal protests: Media outlets torched and journalists injured in deadly unrest - Committee to Protect Journalists
New Delhi, September 10, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Nepali authorities to ensure the safety of journalists covering protests in the Himalayan nation, following reports the offices of at least two media outlets were set on fire and four journalists were injured in the unrest. Violent protests erupted in Kathmandu and other parts...

No Sign of a Magnetar Remnant Following the Kilonova-Producing Long GRB 211211A $\sim 1.7~$Years Later
Genevieve Schroeder (Cornell), Ben Margalit, Brian D. Metzger, Wen-fai Fong, Benjamin P. Gompertz, Kate D. Alexander, Edo Berger, Tanmoy Laskar, Gavin P. Lamb, Andrew Levan, Charles D. Kilpatrick, Jillian C. Rastinejad
https://arxiv.org/a…

No Sign of a Magnetar Remnant Following the Kilonova-Producing Long GRB 211211A $\sim 1.7~$Years Later
In addition to a $γ$-ray burst (GRB), the merger of two neutron stars may produce a temporarily or indefinitely stable neutron star remnant with a strong magnetic field (a "magnetar"). As this magnetar remnant spins down, it can deposit its rotational energy into the surrounding kilonova ejecta, producing synchrotron emission that peaks in the radio bands $\sim$months-years after the merger ("boosted kilonova"). The nearby ($z=0.0763$) long-duration GRB 211211A, which has an apparent kilonova …

Big news for the energy transition!
And a nice little 'told you so' moment for yours truly :)
In the first half of this year, renewables produced more electricity globally than coal, for the first time.
And 2025 is the date I predicted for this to happen, back in 2016, in a blog post for Ecofys! The score was 23%-40% at the time, with most of the renewables share still coming from hydro, and the prediction was less than obvious.

QUERY: grad student journal #acrel https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20131920/query-grad-student-journal

Testing new-physics scenarios with the combined LHAASO and Carpet-3 fluence spectrum of GRB 221009A: axion-like particles and Lorentz-invariance violation
P. S. Satunin, S. V. Troitsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07234

Testing new-physics scenarios with the combined LHAASO and Carpet-3 fluence spectrum of GRB 221009A: axion-like particles and Lorentz-invariance violation
From gamma-ray burst (GRB) 221009A, very high-energy photons were detected: >10 TeV with LHAASO and >100 TeV with Carpet-3. Such energetic photons are expected to be absorbed via electron-positron pair production on their way to the Earth. Their observation might be explained by new physics, including Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) or photon mixing with axion-like particles (ALPs). Here, we construct a joint fluence spectrum by combining flux measurements from both experiments, and fit it u…

"When I hear international leaders speak of “Israel’s right to defend itself,” I wonder: against whom? Against mothers with their babies? Against teachers with their board markers? Against students with their books? The global silence — or worse, complicity — amplifies our grief" -- Dr Hassan El-Nabih

‘I’m happy and sad to see you’: The paradox of surviving the Gaza genocide
A chance encounter with one of my past students at the Islamic University of Gaza highlighted the paradox of surviving the Gaza genocide: feeling joy in surviving the war and sorrow in witnessing what our survival has cost us.

List Coloring the Cartesian Product of a Complete Graph and Complete Bipartite Graph
Hemanshu Kaul, Leonardo Marciaga, Jeffrey A. Mudrock
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16733 https:…

List Coloring the Cartesian Product of a Complete Graph and Complete Bipartite Graph
We study the list chromatic number of the Cartesian product of a complete graph of order $n$ and a complete bipartite graph with partite sets of size $a$ and $b$, denoted $χ_{\ell}(K_n \square K_{a,b})$. At the 2024 Sparse Graphs Coalition's Workshop on algebraic, extremal, and structural methods and problems in graph colouring, Mudrock presented the following question: For each positive integer $a$, does $χ_{\ell}(K_n \square K_{a,b}) = n+a$ if and only if $b \geq (n+a-1)!^a/(a-1)!^a$? In th…

“A string of bands have pulled out of a UK music festival hours before they were due to perform after Irish band The Mary Wallopers said they were ‘cut off’ for displaying a Palestinian flag.
The Last Dinner Party, Cliffords and The Academic announced on Saturday that they would no longer be performing at the Victorious festival in Portsmouth following Friday’s incident.
…
Rock band The Last Dinner Party said they would boycott the festival in a statement shared on their Inst…

Bands pull out of UK music festival after The Mary Wallopers say they were ‘cut off’
Irish folk group displayed Palestinian flag on stage in Portsmouth

Modifying the Optical Emission of Vanadyl Phthalocyanine via Molecular Self-Assembly on van der Waals Materials
S. Carin Gavin, William Koll, Moumita Kar, Yiying Liu, Anushka Dasgupta, Ethan Garvey, Thomas W. Song, Chunxi Zhou, Brendan P. Kerwin, Jash Jain, Tobin J. Marks, Mark C. Hersam, George C. Schatz, Jay A. Gupta, Nathaniel P. Stern
https://

Modifying the Optical Emission of Vanadyl Phthalocyanine via Molecular Self-Assembly on van der Waals Materials
Vanadyl phthalocyanine (VOPc) is a promising organic molecule for applications in quantum information because of its thermal stability, efficient processing, and potential as a spin qubit. The deposition of VOPc in different molecular orientations allows the properties to be customized for integration into various devices. However, such customization has yet to be fully leveraged to alter its intrinsic properties, particularly optical emission. Normally, VOPc films on dielectric substrates emit…

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen